


This Is Not Your Year

by montparnasse



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: First War with Voldemort, M/M, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-21
Updated: 2017-12-21
Packaged: 2019-02-18 04:35:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13092516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/montparnasse/pseuds/montparnasse
Summary: 1979, year of war and obsession and sleep loss and sexual frustration. Sirius is hoping to go out with a bang and not a whimper; enter Remus, stage left.





	This Is Not Your Year

**Author's Note:**

> Written for weirandcairn for rs small gifts 2017! Happy holidays to all, and here's hoping the new year treats you well.

When the first letter came he was lying in bed at midmorning, spiritually languishing with a cup of coffee and a bludgeoning headache jackknifing through his right eye socket, having spent the night getting dearly wasted with Marlene McKinnon at a disgusting pub halfway across the city—she and Dorcas had broken up (again) and Dorcas had kicked Marlene out (again) and then launched some of their things out the window and onto the curb below (a first)—until he took the Tube home and stumbled into bed with a cup of lavender tea around midnight, pleasantly loopy, the cold unwinding like a scarf from his skin, everything breathless, London unsleeping, the night full to the brim. Just as he’d gotten to sleep and was dreaming something good and raunchy Remus came crashing through the front door of the flat with someone in tow, a someone with Caradoc Dearborn’s unmistakable fucking AM radio voice, and then after much unnecessary noise in the hallway proceeded to make the bedsprings creak dangerously and slam the headboard merrily into the wall until four in the morning. Thus when he heard the owl at the window Sirius assumed at first that it was time for Round 15 in Remus’s bedroom and was contemplating putting his fist through the wall until he saw the poor thing fluttering between the gap in the curtains, soaked and irate, and got up to let it in with his head spinning briefly into another ear-ringing dimension.

Blinking into the shrill December greylight he saw that the envelope was unmarked; inside was a single scrap of parchment torn from something much larger, written in thick black ink in a severe and slightly mangled script: _HOW MANY MILES TO BABYLON?_ , and then, on the other side, _THREE SCORE MILES AND TEN_. Head throbbing like a heart he held the envelope up to the slurry light and saw wisps of something laid out in a row near the bottom. When he turned it upside down in his palm they turned out to be hairs, not very long, an inky brown-black with a gentle sweeping curl arching out towards the middle; through the wash of nerves he thought he heard a mouse or something scurrying through the cardboard-thin walls. The old rhyme, unbidden, shivered through his ears and ricocheted off the base of his skull all the way down the laddered notches of his spine, like someone walking over his grave.

Last summer, during an excruciating weekend training exercise for the then-nascent Order of the Phoenix, Moody had cornered him and impressed upon him with much spittle and intimidating eye-swiveling the importance of understanding timeliness in matters such as these: if you’re not early then you’re late, and when you’re late people die, or your mate ends up trailing behind you on the way to St. Mungo’s with your splinched balls or your nipples in a jar with no hope of anything in your future but a cautionary tale and a grim objet d’art on the mantel. Since it didn’t seem exactly urgent or as if any of his delicate bits were under immediate threat he applied the same hungover logic he had to that first Order-mandated exercise to which he’d shown up ten minutes late: it would hold while he finished his coffee. Unsteady on his feet he pulled on his jeans and went to the kitchen, coffee cup clutched warm and sweet against his temple, blunting the pain. From Remus’s room nothing stirred though perhaps that just meant he’d had the belated decency to put up a silencing charm; given Sirius’s own deafening sexual history he had no right to be angry but it wasn’t as if he’d ever let a reasonable thing like that stop him.

As the pain and the roiling nausea abated he made toast and shuffled the _Daily Prophet_ around halfheartedly while the sediment began to settle in his gut. He was meant to be packing, as he and Remus were meant to leave on a two-week trip to Cornwall tomorrow morning, where they’d be spending Christmas in a series of dingy hotel rooms and seaside cottages because it was preferable to moping around the flat like they’d done last year (he’d taken a few jibes over this from their friends ranging from good-natured if clueless ribbing to vague hostility, which had been the case since rumors and insults and jokes et cetera began to whirl around Remus at roughly age thirteen, and then Sirius too in seventh year). Yesterday he and Remus had had a fight, one of those expansive touch-offs that filled the whole flat like a smothering veil of smoke, ostensibly about something very stupid but which was really—as it usually was—about something else entirely. Then Remus came home and got his brains fucked out on the other side of the wall, moaning the whole time with a theatrical shamelessness offset by the horrible and degrading fact that listening to him had gotten Sirius off—twice. And now it seemed someone wanted to send them on a gruesome scavenger hunt for the holidays. Happy fucking Christmas.

“So what do we do about this,” asked Remus about half an hour later over another cup of coffee and a cleansing morning cigarette, Dearborn having left already. As he’d sat down Remus had winced rather exaggeratedly, like Sirius didn’t know from experience that Dearborn’s dick was the size of the size of his ring finger when it was hard and he had no idea what to do with it. In recompense Sirius yawned so enormously his jaw cracked but either Remus didn’t notice or he didn’t care.

“Tell the old man. Say someone needs to look into it. He’ll look like he’s really racking his brains for a few seconds. Then get assigned to do it ourselves anyway. Sound about right?”

“He’ll also act like he never saw this coming and he’s terribly sorry to burden us at the holidays and so on. But if we could just find it in our hearts to go mucking around the countryside inviting death and misery this yuletide, it would mean so much.”

“We really ought to see about opening that fortune telling shop,” said Sirius, stretching, “easy money, easy everything. Want me to floo?”

Remus was turning one of the blond hairs over between his thumb and forefinger, watching it catch the buttery kitchen light like a bird feather, almost mournful. “We could apparate to his office.”

“We could _apparate_. I’m amazed you can even walk after that. I’m amazed you didn’t like, ascend spiritually to another reality after that kind of railing.”

“I came back after work last night but you weren’t here,” said Remus, not looking at him. In fact Sirius knew it had been his last night at his job, a dismal temporary position as a stockboy at a magical cooking supplies warehouse during the busy season; over the course of two months he’d learned to boil pasta and make a passable quiche. Sirius still did the heavy lifting in the kitchen. “So.”

“I was across town at the pub,” he said, “McKinnon’s been on a bit of a bender,” not missing the way Remus’s mouth tightened incrementally like January ice, like a noose. “She and Dorcas broke up again, kind of impressively this time. Something about making each other miserable and McKinnon not shutting up about some girl she met at a poetry reading.”

“Lucky for you,” said Remus, and then he got up before Sirius could get another word in and took his coffee and his spidery rack-stretched limbs back down the hallway, knock-kneed in his flannel pajama pants all the way down, leaving Sirius at the table with the wooly dregs of pain beating bright confetti-bursts around his skull and the sullen defensiveness Remus always seemed to reel out of him hissing away somewhere behind his clenched teeth. If they were normal people with functioning emotional compasses they might’ve apologized but the crux of it perhaps was that neither of them would have meant it, so there wasn’t much point. Don’t fix what isn’t broken and blah blah blah, but no one ever tells you not to put something broken back together again and expect it to walk and talk and act the same after some half-assed patchwork suturing over your nth whiskey in the middle of the night. Best to love it like a wound. Best to suck the venom from it and call it your own.

That night the snow came down out of the west until sometime after dawn, needle-cold winds creaking through the droughty flat and rinsing the bad mood from the air, London an amnesiac recollection of itself when they stumbled outside into the swallowing ice-glint of the whiteout light like a murderous act of God. As it turned out they’d been correct on all but one count: Dumbledore in all his ageless and unearthly eminence didn’t even pretend to entertain the thought of asking anyone else to investigate and sent them on their way with their infernal cargo packed between Remus’s jeans in his backpack and a promise to relay any relevant information i.e. immediate death threats posthaste. At the time part of him wondered at it, the curious symmetry of the timing and the unsurprised cornflower gleam of Dumbledore’s eyes over the rim of his glasses, feeling like an animal catching a scent that led inevitably to the slaughterhouse, but then he was paranoid. Short-sighted. Delusional and oblivious to anything he couldn’t see from where his head was glued up his own ass, if you listened to Remus when he was on a roll. He tried to put it from his mind.

Their plan was still to take the M4 to Bodmin Moor and spend the night at a wizarding inn overlooking the toothy granite tors, where they’d have time for a walk around the winter river and an investigative look at the magical grocery before the Cornish sun dipped romantically into the cradle of the earth and they went back to their room to scour any relevant maps for whatever lurid clues could be found there, and anyway as Sirius was also obliged to finish up some cursebreaking work for the office on the road this seemed the lesser of two evils, though he felt a viscous strike of guilt flare up from the base of his spine and spread like sickly molasses tip to toe for thinking it; Remus, he thought, would’ve hit him, Lily too. On the front steps of their building a bird perched in the snow and looked up at the feeder Sirius had hung outside the kitchen window, red as a beating heart, singing like a last leaf in the wind, the only twinge of color in all of London that wasn’t Remus’s cold-pinked face coming out the front door, the only song in the world that wasn’t Remus’s footsteps coming nearer in his heavy boots, Remus’s mouth with the chord of a smile pulling at his chapped bottom lip, rhyming with anything.

Swinging a leg over the motorbike he handed his cigarette back to Remus to let him finish off the last few drags; Remus had been smoking for longer than any of them and already he had a nicotine stain between his scabby forefinger and his crooked middle finger. Sirius had long thought it was sexy. Then he put on Dearborn’s huge sunglasses and kind of ruined the effect, but with his wiry uncombed hair and his big nose all the way down to the brittle cut of his jaw and his long, skinny neck wrapped in a scarf he looked dead handsome anyway, like a Quentin Blake drawing of himself. Somewhat grudgingly he’d brought helmets along, which Remus had bought secondhand after their first near-death experience at a stoplight behind a Muggle eighteen-wheeler; Sirius, trying for comfort, had said it was almost like losing your virginity except it was acceptable to talk about in public. Remus had threatened to slash the tires but he still let Sirius drive him around, and he still stuck his hands in Sirius’s pockets, and Sirius could still feel his breath at his ear and the back of his neck, his voice threading meltingly along Sirius’s rib-rungs with the blood moving through his heart.

“Good to go?” Sirius asked. He’d already cast a couple of warming charms but Remus tried for another. “Holding onto your favorite bits?”

“Remember there’s ice on the roads. Also we’re possibly being hunted.”

“I’ll go slow.”

“You’re so sweet,” said Remus, “always with all my extremities and orifices in mind.” On the seat he pressed very close to Sirius, hips first, the way he always did.

“It’d be nice if someone around here ever thought of mine.”

“Yes but that’d be a full-time job,” said Remus, reaching underneath Sirius’s chin to adjust the strap. “Use protection,” he said, breath hot against Sirius’s neck, and then slipped his quiet arms around Sirius’s waist and put his ungloved hands into his coat pockets, right over his hipbones. Somehow Remus always forgot he owned two pairs of gloves.

He turned the key in the ignition to drown out his thoughts as much as anything, which were straying to indecent if familiar pastures aided dangerously by the machine vibrating between his legs and Remus’s fingers plucking a nonsense rhythm against the basin of his hips that felt disconcertingly like “Take Me to the River.” If anyone could hear his thoughts he suspected they’d have his head in a guillotine; he’d read a story once about a woman who got off while watching a public hanging and by the end of it the face in his head had transposed onto Remus’s slouched shoulders, Remus’s dusty-warm skin underneath the collar of his shirt. Before he could spelunk the depths of his probable insanity and/or psychosexual depravity any further Sirius pulled away from the curb and set off down the street into the vast tangled wilderness of the west, into the bloodied and beckoning December moors, the drumbeat of Remus’s fingers and their breath unscrolling in the winter air like they were the only things in the whole of London that could keep time, like the first sounds at the dawn of the waking world.

—

Near the coast at Looe the engine started making a funny noise kind of like the chainsaw he’d watched Remus’s father use once at the Lupins’ old farmhouse in Somerset during the nauseous heatwave summer before sixth year, cutting away at a dead apple tree that had fallen into the disused barn. That was the summer he’d made out with Remus drunkenly in his cold attic bedroom one night with the scythe moon lancing through the dormer windows, Television’s “Friction” spinning prophetically on the record player; they’d never talked about it and afterwards Sirius understood they’d both been feigning much drunker than they were, but as it was only six months after the Snafu and the red bead of his blood smearing Remus’s bottom lip seemed like the kind of vengeful tithe Remus had thought about taking for far longer than a five-minute heart-in-throat interlude between the waiting-for and the next Sirius had elected to forget it. Which meant that he’d thought about it roughly eight times a day ever since. 

Mathematically that was somewhere in the realm of terrifying, with enough gargantuan exponents to outnumber all the stars in certain galaxies; if he kept up like this he thought it would probably coalesce into an almighty and devouring black-hole void eternal enough to outlast the heat death of the universe. Not long after the start of sixth year Remus had started hooking up with Dearborn, which Sirius wasn’t supposed to know about at the time and which had felt like such an abject betrayal that he’d lost whole seething nights of sleep over it, neither for the first time nor the last. On the other bed in the shitty hotel room they’d rented while the motorbike was at the mechanic’s shop Remus was talking to the man himself about some sites Dumbledore wanted them to check into, his hand wrapped around the cord of the rotary phone and flexing very slightly on his thigh, near his crotch; Sirius wondered what Dearborn would do if he got on his knees and unzipped Remus’s jeans. He wondered what Remus would do.

“Declan McLaggen disappeared last night,” Remus told him as they walked around town the next morning. The motorbike still wasn’t fixed but they’d been promised it would be done by early afternoon, so after Remus got off the phone again they went wandering around the river where the houses stacked like bones in the cold crystal sunlight, eating leek and potato pasties for breakfast—Sirius had chivalrously loaned Remus his gloves—while they ventured all the way out to the Duloe stone circle, sharing a thermos of coffee and listening to the currents of ancient magic murmuring honey-slow beneath their feet like static electricity. “They found his car backed into the side of an abandoned house way out in the Peak District. The door was open but they didn’t find footprints or anything even though it snowed up there the night before last.”

“You know spells can take care of that.”

“No trace of any, according to Vance. It’s like he just opened the car door and stepped into somewhere else. His wife says she got a weird phone call really late, like someone was definitely on the other end but they never said anything. And of course the aurors can’t trace it because they’ve never seen fit to put like, even the slightest amount of stock in Muggle methods.”

Of late Sirius had had the notion on several heartbeatless occasions that he was being watched, through the windows in the flat and on his way home from work in the blood-swill of sunset and coming out of James and Lily’s place in Lambeth last month, a week or so after the wedding; a few days ago he woke with unquiet dreams in the middle of the night convinced someone was in the room with him, watching over his shoulder from the sludgy shadow-mouth on the other side of the bedroom, just beyond the foot of the bed. When he got up he found Remus awake on the couch watching an old movie on the television, looking a bit shaken but saying only that he couldn’t sleep when Sirius stretched out on the couch with him and fell asleep. He couldn’t recall what the movie was but he remembered it had been severely homoerotic, though that might’ve just been the proximity of his feet to Remus’s lap underneath the blanket tinging everything a delirious fever-red.

“You know you’re a brilliant man, Moony,” said Sirius. He’d lit a cigarette and whenever Remus wanted a drag he grabbed him by the wrist and pressed Sirius’s fingers to his mouth. “If you want to knock some sense into Moody bodily or otherwise I’ll fundraise for your bail money.”

“Are you coming on to me?” Remus knocked his elbow into Sirius’s side on purpose as they walked the sinews of the road, the town cloistered white as conch shells and very soft from across the river, like an oil painting. “Keep it up and I might let you lick the soles of my boots.”

“Fuck off.”

“With you in the next bed?”

“You’d get us kicked out every hotel from here to Land’s End the way you moan like you’ve got a fucking spotlight on you.”

“Normally I don’t,” said Remus. When Sirius tried to catch his eye he wouldn’t look him in the face.

“That good, was it?”

“It was alright I guess. It’s definitely been better.”

Jealousy suffused liquid and invective through every rafter of his body. Against the choking thunder-crush of it he unenthusiastically changed the subject. “Have you gotten the feeling lately that someone’s watching you? Not all the time though, like, you’re walking home and you keep thinking something’s following you.”

“Or in the kitchen some mornings,” said Remus. Very quietly he glanced over at Sirius. “Sometimes I thought it might be you.”

“Why would I be staring at you,” said Sirius, who in fact had been staring at various parts of Remus since fifth year when no one was looking and who could have further waxed poetic about Remus’s crooked nose or his mouth just open in surprise or his ass or his callused hands or the narrow arch of his spine bent like a willow branch in the brittle unspeaking moments just before moonrise opened its mouth and unzipped along his spine. The cruelty of it scorched all the way down. “Let alone when I’m not even in the room.”

 

“Well I guess I thought wrong. Forget it.” 

“For someone who loves to dish it out you can’t take even the slightest bit of the same bullshit you give.”

“Last night I woke up and I thought someone was in the room,” Remus said very loudly. “Was anything—did you notice anything odd, any dreams or any magic you could feel in the area? God knows you can sniff that out like a dog.”

“I dreamed I was eating an entire cantaloupe, rind and all I mean, like an animal. It was really fucking up my teeth.”

At that Remus turned toward him and glared although Sirius could see the corner of his mouth curled into a comma, whether in amusement or agitation Sirius couldn’t say. “The motorbike’s probably done by now,” he said, “and as romantic as all this is I’m not sure I like the thought of someone stalking us around a tiny Muggle town.”

“You’d rather they do it in our own flat?”

“Not the best location for your gruesome murder, I know. We don’t even have a balustrade.”

“I’d like to be sexually murdered in an old cottage on the moors. Dusty Persian rugs on the floor, big mirrors on the walls, wineglass in hand, shirt unbuttoned and artfully open just so. Suicide is on the record player and “Cheree” would start up right when you walked in. It’d be a scythe moon too, with a nice harvest glow.”

Remus was watching him from across the slice of sunlight in his eyes as Sirius lifted the stub of a cigarette to his lips and then— _and then_ , the shrill pause before he said it seemed to say, _what are you gonna do about it?_ —took a drag. “Let’s go find one,” he said.

Onward, then.

They got back to the hotel in the searing blue wash of afternoon, the motorbike rumbling steadily if ungracefully along while Remus clutched for his precious life at his waist and his hips where his hands were tucked extremely sensually into Sirius’s pockets (he’d relinquished the gloves), thumbs occasionally stroking over his hipbones so obscenely Sirius actually sped up for fear he’d get hard and have to drive around town thinking about cold showers and Filch’s chest hair for half an hour. Luckily he kept the stopper on the incendiary cocktail of his hormones and was filing it all lovingly away for jerk-off fantasy material to be used later when he noticed that the painting outside their room had seemingly changed while they were out: it was still the same sleepy-blue pastoral with a house far off in the distance but now someone was coming down the lane, their face shrouded in the greenblack shadow of their hat. He blinked a few times as he fumbled for the keys, wondering why he hadn’t noticed before.

“Was that the same when we checked in?” he asked Remus, nodding towards the frame. “It’s just I swear there wasn’t anyone in it before.”

“I didn’t notice,” said Remus. “Sirius I swear if you’ve lost the keys.”

“Ye of little faith. I also lost your Christmas present and our apparition licenses.” As he fished the keyring out from the unfortunate depths of his pocket he leaned in and looked at the painting one last time. “You know I was thinking, about that letter—three score miles and ten and whatever, I mean, that could be anywhere at all.”

“God, you’re so smart. I never thought of that, not even once.”

“I was just _saying_ , I’m not sure it’s helpful of the old man to expect us to know what to do with it when he could’ve ruined anyone else’s holiday. Fletcher, for instance. That asshole’s well overdue for some bad luck.”

“You’re a _genius_ , Pads, good God, how do you even keep it all from spilling out?”

“If you want to suck my dick you can just ask.”

A pale inhale, the quiet snick-clack of the key in the lock, and then Remus’s voice at the threshold: “Is that right.”

Exactly four seconds after he said it and the flickering chill in the room had just registered in a sickly wave of goosebumps prickling whisperingly up Sirius’s arms Remus grabbed him by the elbow and yanked him backwards so that they both staggered into the wall, landing on each other in a mangled cacophony of limbs. The window was open to the vivid cold and the blinding sunlight tearing across the river, the mothbitten chintz curtains catching like flames in the winter wind. Stomach dragging somewhere down by his ankles Sirius pushed off the wall and cast a wandless _Revelio_ while Remus flipped on all the lights but in the woolly spell-glow they found nothing but an envelope on the windowsill which Remus immediately checked for curses and opened, the fault-line of his shoulders very tight, like something being hunted. Nervously Sirius thought about reaching out and rubbing his back or pressing closer, holding Remus’s head to his shoulder or the warm place just above his scarf where his heartbeat was dizzy-hot and slamming fast. But he didn’t.

Inside the envelope was a folded piece of hotel stationery which read simply: _The window was unlocked_. The handwriting was the same as the first. At this unhappy juncture he noticed a cigarette still lit in the ashtray on the desk, a thin silver stream of smoke murmuring lazily from the tip. 

“You’ll notice a minor detail about a fucking painting in a lousy hotel but you don’t notice the window is open the minute you walk into the room.” Remus had begun shoving everything they hadn’t already packed into their bags and would not look at Sirius.

“Like this is _my_ fucking fault.”

“It’s your fault that you don’t take any of this seriously, and I know you don’t Sirius, shut up. You don’t have to. I’d say you’ll get yourself killed but chances are it’d be you getting someone else blown into bloody tatters.”

“So what, I just joined the Order for shits and giggles?”

“You did it because James did it and you don’t even believe in anything. No matter, it doesn’t matter what happens, either fucking way you don’t lose anything.”

“Must be so hard for you, being the only one who understands.”

Since late winter they’d been having this same threadbare argument but it was one Remus never tired of and one which usually ended in one or both of them saying something that couldn’t exactly be taken back. Remus was still packing but Sirius could see he’d sort of dropped his center of gravity as if for a fight; his wand was sticking out of the front jeans pocket but Sirius had always been quicker when it came to a fistfight with magic or otherwise: Remus had a faint and fragile ribbon of a scar on his left shoulderblade, which Sirius had given him in seventh year. In recompense Remus had left a hound’s-tooth cicatrice-gash vaguely in the shape of question mark on his middle finger, over which he occasionally wore a ring less to disguise and more to accentuate. The walls were thin; he wondered what kind of sound their heads would make bouncing off the plaster.

“I understand better than _you_ ,” Remus was saying from the bathroom now, “better than McKinnon too, for the record. At least James has Lily, at least he has like even the dimmest goddamn hope of understanding.”

His heart in his gut had begun to churn volcanically, following the sound of Remus throwing things around in the bathroom where Sirius knew he was stealing towels. When he kicked the door all the way open it hit the doorstop hard and echoed off the tile, his own eyes very dark in the mirror, anger twisting quicksilver along every hissing nerve-fuse. “So the way I see it is James has Lily and you have everything, you have all the shit I’ve ever done for you, shit you know goddamn well has never been and would never be reciprocated, shit you can’t repay, so you might want to factor that into your selective psychoanalysis the next time you decide to prematurely martyr yourself. Get your shit together and let’s go.”

Unsaid: You owe me, and I owe my holy life to you in penance, and we will never be rid of each other.

Minutes later as they sped down the street chasing the dagger-bright blur of the sun into the north he heard something like footsteps behind them, but when he looked no one was there. Around his ribs Remus’s fingers squeezed tight, counting every rung, one-two-three-four-five one-two-three like a vindictive typist or a penitent counting Hail Marys on the very warp and weft of his best and worst mistakes. All along the road in the blazing spread of late afternoon the sun pulled their shadows towards each other, and when the wind changed directions they pressed close to each other, Remus’s arms around his waist and Sirius’s shoulderblades pressed to the headwaters of his pulse in his chest where it slid down the tributary of Sirius’s spine and into his own. Altogether this was undifficult to decode: it was surrender, and shelter, and get the fuck over yourselves. It was not exactly forgiveness.

—

They spent two nights in a one-room cottage out on the moor a few miles from Siblyback Lake where the stars were so bright it was as if they’d been torn that night like jewels out of the coal-dust of the sky, the serrated rock-ribbed hills rising around them on all sides. For a whole day they hiked the craggy fields and rowed a boat out to the middle of the lake, still slightly stoned, and watched the sun set into the bleary heather hills until they rowed to shore again and walked in the golden gloaming cold as hoarfrost back to the cottage; inside they lit the woodstove and the oil lamps and made chicken pot pie while the wind howled infernally into the thatched roof. Magda Burgess, a Muggleborn who’d been several years above them at Hogwarts and who was involved with the Order only tangentially, had disappeared the night before: her boyfriend had come home from his night shift and found an empty flat and the duvet pulled neatly down on the bed as though she’d gotten up for a drink in the night and hadn’t yet come back. 

Try as they might he and Remus could discern no geographic connection among any of it and after two hours of looking for patterns where there were none they pushed the maps aside and turned on the radio, but they had to turn it off in favor of Sirius’s _Let It Bleed_ cassette after twenty minutes as it was intercut with an alarming amount of static. They found a dusty crate of board games and settled on Scrabble, which Remus won after Sirius couldn’t disprove the existence of “neocanine” as a word (he claimed he’d read it in a pamphlet someone lent him at the Werewolf Registry) and then opted to share the sagging feather bed. After some unnecessary jostling and surreptitious rubbing of thighs and fingers waxing lyrically into the soft places where their t-shirts had ridden up they fell asleep, on separate sides in theory, but in practice close enough to each other’s breathing bodies that if Sirius woke up with an erection at any point Remus was definitely going to know about it.

He did wake up very late—he’d rolled onto his side and Remus’s arm was touching his chest, his thigh dangerously close to Sirius’s crotch—and at first he thought it was the wind juddering in the shingles lining the outer walls until he caught the rhythm in it: the staccato metronome of footsteps pacing up and down and up again on the short wooden stairs leading to the door.

Feeling simultaneously like he’d just been electrocuted and also snorted the purest line of coke on God’s green earth he shook Remus awake in a cold sweat and put his fingers to his soft mouth dry with sleep, which under normal circumstances would have been almost intolerably erotic. With his wand in the other hand he cast a silent _Lumos_ and watched Remus’s eyes grow five sizes when he understood what was happening, fear freezing deep and swelling quick in his lungs and his throat. Up, up, up, and then the rhythmic descent, down and down and down—and then, deafeningly, nothing. Somewhere far off a dog was barking.

Unslept and jumpy the next morning Sirius made breakfast sandwiches with egg and goat cheese and mushrooms while Remus packed their things and mainlined coffee like it was ambrosia from heaven above, the whole scene replaying itself all day like something out of _The Night of the Hunter_. Twice before they left they both thought they heard something moving in the ceiling but decided it was just a mouse scurrying through the old walls for what warmth it could find; with a strange possessing thrill not unlike déjà vu or a dream this struck him as significant but he couldn’t have said why, and by the time they were on the road again he’d forgotten it.

—

By the time they got to the Roseland the weather had taken a sudden turn for the livid cold, the sea-sharp wind rattling in their mouths and their fingers; Remus had lost the gloves and their atlas had vanished somewhere near Mevagissey but he spelled warming charms very sweetly into Sirius’s hands as they drove down the coast, stunned silent and stiff at the knifeblade-bite of the December air flaying their cold faces. They rented a lopsided cottage the size of a birdhouse that smelled like cedar and pine on a beach far to the north that looked cut from sheer stone on the anvil of the sea where the wild wet grass and the pebble-shrewd shoreline rose up ravenous against the winter waves. Nights they wrapped themselves in scarves and thick socks and watched the pinwheel stars come out across the defiant landscape as the clouds rolled in from the sea, promising rain.

More than once he woke to Remus burning bacon or fresh chard in the next room—Sirius was emphatically not a morning person and Remus seemed to have very recently gotten decadent ideas above his skill level and had insisted on cooking several times since they’d come down to the coast, with varying degrees of edibility—and spent the morning tucked away at the sunny kitchen table, pouring Remus coffee and happily eating whatever singed and/or mutilated thing was put in front of him like it was his first meal out of prison. All day long they explored the jutting green coves and toured the lighthouses and castles scattered within easy distance, taking spontaneous trips to the local villages or up to Truro to see a movie or get shitfaced drunk at one of the pubs or visit the markets. Late at night they searched the shore for seaglass with freezing fingers and came inside to light the fireplace and read each other crackpot stories from the _Quibbler_ , the wireless on the mantel playing a terrible dramatization of _Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead_. The beach was secluded enough that they could see no other sign of life for miles save the steady lighthouse beacon yearning relentlessly across the booming sea; in better weather they might’ve stripped and gone swimming in the sunset tide. He imagined drifting along stoned with Remus, the lilting waves like a tongue, his hand around Remus’s cock while he tried to keep his head above water.

A few days before Christmas they came back from the pub to a note stuck near the doorknob, the ink heavy, still damp: _You’re going the wrong way_. Enclosed was the atlas they’d lost, shrunken magically, showing the A390 they’d taken to the coast days earlier.

Thus far the most likely theory was that the disappeared had been put under _Imperius_ , though it still didn’t account for certain details. Declan McLaggen had been spotted near Exeter two days earlier, and an informant at Gringotts reported that Magda Burgess and another Muggleborn who had gone missing some months ago had made withdrawals recently. Following some reluctant discussion with Dearborn via Floo—Sirius’s ankle kept brushing electrically against Remus’s on the wood floor—they concluded that the enormous handwriting was unidentifiable, which either of them could’ve said well enough without Dearborn’s fucking input. Much more disturbingly the hairs from the first letter were Sirius’s.

Someone, Dearborn said, pausing deliberately to take a drag of his clove cigarette the way Sirius hated, had leaked information from the inside, and very recently, and in fact it was possible select among the Order had been Imperius’d. The goal seemed to be to lure them into something, he said, staring meaningfully at Remus.

“He always was paranoid,” said Sirius. The electricity had fried that evening and they hadn’t bothered to do anything about it or indeed anything else, dirty dishes piled in the sink and mud tracked onto the floorboards in a nautilus trail from when they brought in firewood that afternoon. As an early Christmas present he’d bought Remus a huge slab of good chocolate from the village a few miles uphill, the kind cut like granite and coated with a reddish patina; with magic they’d made hot chocolate in the fireplace with fresh cream and chili, and for a while Remus had put his feet in Sirius’s lap while they read each other bullshit crossword clues, filling in the filthiest things that would fit. Now he was at the fireplace rolling a cigarette on Sirius’s battered Yeats anthology, their _Lust for Life_ cassette playing in the radio, which Sirius had long thought had the precise boozy-warm flavor of every good memory he’d ever made.

“I like them paranoid,” said Remus, “but I think you do too.”

“How’s that.”

“A few of the more well-adjusted ones you’ve pulled are talkative of a morning.” Sometimes when whoever he’d been hooking up with left the next morning Sirius would lie in bed listening while they made a cup of tea and occasionally attempted extremely stilted conversation with Remus, who was unresponsive at best and a complete asshole manchild at worst. “McKinnon too.”

“That was one time and it was like, deeply not whatever you got it in your head that it was.”

“Dearborn then,” said Remus, licking the side of his Rizla with rather more tongue than was necessary. “You know I slept with him at New Year’s last year too. He’s a shitty host.”

Indeed Sirius did know this. At the time it had accounted for roughly seventy-five percent of his attraction to Dearborn, which shot up to eighty-five when he watched Remus walk out of the bedroom sort of jelly-legged with his flannel unbuttoned showing a hickey darkening at his collarbone, smelling like cloves. About two hours later he sucked Dearborn off on the unmade bed, smelling Remus like blood or like magic spilled redolent and inflammatory on the tangled sheets. Royally not wanting to change the subject but also not wanting to further incriminate himself yet he considered his options, which were a) deny everything or b) change the subject.

“Rhys Rowntree,” he said by way of option b. In his head this made a sound like a metal folding chair straining madly against its hinges. “That was—seventh year?”

“Rhys wasn’t paranoid, he was just an idiot and he did way too much peyote.”

“I always wondered where he got it.”

“He stole it from the potions stockhouse in Hogsmeade,” said Remus, “and he wouldn’t share.”

“I’d share my peyote with you, Moony.”

“Did you get me peyote for Christmas?” Remus was smiling at him, his mouth split just open showing the firelight catching on the bare glint of his teeth. “That’s the sweetest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

“Last week I said I’d duel Dumbledore to the death if anything ever happened while he’s got you in fucking Siberia or wherever doing full-moon reconnaissance,” said Sirius, lighting his cigarette with the candle-flame on the coffee table. “Give me a little credit.”

“Again with my virtue and et cetera in mind. I haven’t got any to speak of and you’ve got even less. But at least I know you’ll be there to avenge me even if half of that’s just bar talk.”

On the radio Iggy was singing over the wear and tear of the tape hiss like a cult leader or a barroom messiah, _I am an easy mark with my broken heart…_ Frustratingly he couldn’t tell whether the song better suited him or Remus; perhaps it was both. They so often used music as a oblique metonym for everything they couldn’t and/or wouldn’t talk about that when there was no clear cast of characters or roadmap in the ongoing and admittedly self-imposed tragicomedy of their lives he sometimes felt as if a safety net had been ripped away, leaving him stumbling around blind and alone, arms outstretched, destinationless and yearning. He took a drag of his cigarette and noticed the ash had smudged onto his jeans and his fisherman’s sweater while he was watching Remus at the window, who was looking out at the lemon-wedge of the moon and the lighthouse slicing into the nighttime waves like divers. As ever he couldn’t decide whether he wanted Remus to look at him or not.

Realizing for the ten thousandth time that the maze-trail of that thought dead-ended in some sort of Gordian knot he could never unravel Sirius picked at the dirt under his nails as if he could divine something there while Remus swayed a bit in the uncertain middle distance. “Theoretically this would be a good time to be sexually murdered,” he said, “electricity out, candles all over, fire casting monstrous shadows on the walls. Not an ideal soundtrack maybe but I suppose you could put on one of your Eno tapes.”

“Talking like that’ll just give whoever’s been following us around ideas,” said Remus, arching his back in a lazy half-stretch. He’d look good doing that in one of Sirius’s shirts and nothing else. “And besides I wouldn’t be getting erotically stabbed. I’d be your dear gay friend who’s dying of tuberculosis and also his sinful lust.”

“I thought the sinful lust part was more my forte.”

“No, you’re just more obvious about it,” Remus laughed. “Did you really get me peyote for Christmas?”

“I’m not telling. Especially if you’re not going to let all the details hang out,” said Sirius, smiling around the orange ember of his cigarette and taking his feet off the coffee table, making the rickety legs wobble. Remus’s eyes flowed with the movement of it like watching shadow-play in the firelight, up his ankles to his knees spread far apart and between his thighs to his groin and halfway up his belly before he looked away again, staring into the unspace of the mirror hanging on the other side of the room.

“There’s not that much you wouldn’t already know,” said Remus, “but I do think he’s right. About some kind of, I don’t know, _Imperius_ contingent.”

“I’d rather _Crucio_ outright,” said Sirius, which was what he’d long thought. Of the three Unforgivables _Imperius_ frightened him the most: the gaps in the memory like missing teeth in a comb, marionette limbs plucked in the dead of the night by unseen hands, something itching always at the back of your head like a permanent migraine aura you could never shake. The presence of another swelling in your lungs, blood under your fingernails, whole nights undreaming and blank as the sucking vacuum between stars. All his life he’d known possession down to his black Black blood and still he’d rather be metaphysically excoriated, flesh flayed from the bone, every blood cell burst in his veins. “At least with the other two you know what you’re getting.”

“Or you think you do.” Even this far away he could see the rainwashed yellow in the amber-green of Remus’s eyes. “What would you ask me,” he said, “if you thought I was under _Imperius_?”

“Probably something about how deeply and irrevocably I’ve fucked up at some point seeing as you have an encyclopedic memory where it concerns any and all of that, most especially if you can make me feel like I’ve ruined everything and you had no part in it whatsoever, et cetera.”

“You used to accuse _me_ of never wanting to have fun. And anyway someone has to remember for you or else you’d go around acting the same as you did until like, the summer after fifth year, and no one fucking needs that.”

“We already have questions—”

“What would you do if you came home and something didn’t seem right?” asked Remus, bulldozing right over him, which Sirius supposed was one of the many questionable traits he’d picked up from spending so much time around himself and James. “Like, the paint on the walls looks like it’s just a shade off, and your drawers look like someone’s been going through them, and I seemed sort of out of tune? If I didn’t get you to make me dinner or I didn’t read you crossword clues in the morning or I actually folded the laundry. Come on, Pads. What would you ask me?” Heartbeat, heartbeat. “I know you want to, I’m surprised your tongue’s not hanging out of your mouth. You’ve wanted to this entire time.”

Are we really doing this, he thought, trying to think of something that sounded good even as every word dissolved somewhere between his throat and his mouth. Had it not been wartime and had they not been hunted by whatever vengeful entity had sets its crosshairs upon them and had everything not been evaporating around them for almost two years by then he might’ve swallowed it down and asked something relatively tame, like, When did you lose your virginity? Or, How old were you when your parents divorced, or what were you listening to when I came to see you in summer ‘76? But from across the room Remus was watching the flicker-flare of the candlelight on his face, and the silence had gone stale on the edge of something, and there was a war on—there was a war on, and they drank it in their coffee every morning and laid down with it every night, and when he blinked he swore he could see the ghostly afterimage of Remus’s eyes burnt out like arson behind his eyelids, and who would he even be if he wasn’t taking every stupid risk he still could in the face of death or Remus Lupin or both?

Unsure how to say it he took a breath like he was trying to sniff something out, nostrils flaring like a dog looking for its master as he supposed he’d been doing all along. If he was ever going to be anyone’s dog he would’ve been Remus’s, if Remus would believe him, if Remus would let him. And again they were watching each other as they had maybe always been watching each other, hackles raised, staring out across the gulf of years and life and possibility as if he could leap gleefully into it if he just pushed off.

“Since you want it so badly I’d ask why I lost a whole night’s sleep two weeks ago,” said Sirius, “though it’s possible the neighbors and like forty percent of Camden all know about that too, so maybe it wouldn’t count.”

Remus laughed his wild withering laugh. “Because I was fucking Caradoc Dearborn.”

“Into another dimension from the sound of it.”

“First he bent me over the desk,” said Remus, “and we sort of knocked everything off.”

Both he and Remus had bizarre systems of organization which made no sense whatsoever to anyone but themselves: their bookshelves and record crates were disasters of invaluable gibberish and their desks were often piled with books and letters and tapes and cherished miscellany, though Remus was more particular about it than Sirius was and would gladly bitch whenever something was disturbed. “Do you like that,” asked Sirius, the end of his cigarette burning orange-hot and refracting on the pearls of his sloe-dark eyes, which were on Remus, which were only on Remus.

“I like the kitchen counter better. Don’t you?”

“No one’s ever bent me over the kitchen counter.”

“Because you’d rather do the bending,” said Remus, his mouth just open, “right?”

“You ought to win something for figuring that out all by yourself. But I guess Mr. Sunglasses at Night might’ve told you.”

“I can hear it when you forget your silencing charms, more like,” said Remus. “But I would’ve guessed that anyway.”

“What else do you wanna guess,” he asked, ashing his cigarette into the saucer they’d peeled oranges on earlier. “Remember, _Imperius_ is a very dire curse. Get your fucking ammo while you can.”

In the harsh unsilence Remus’s eyes were huge; if he reached down into the chord of magic spinning between them Sirius thought he could feel his heartbeat slamming like a bassline, like electricity and yearning, the ache beneath all the other aches in his heart-meat and his soul-guts and his groin and his skull and his hundred thousand capillaries. At times like this everything seemed very obvious until it didn’t. Any sudden movements and it would all vanish like water into wine.

“I’d guess you’re good with your mouth,” said Remus, “but that’d be cheating because Dearborn did tell me about that.”

“While he was fucking you?”

“While I was sucking him off.” Remus smiled to the tune of the braying twist of Sirius’s gut. “I don’t swallow for him and I think it pisses him off. Especially knowing you were in the next room.”

“He’s shit in bed,” he said before he could stop himself. “Like it makes me worry about you—your taste in men frankly but also that you’ve never like, had a decent blowjob in your life. Or that you only come less than half the time.”

“My bloody hero,” said Remus, laughing. “I do, every time. You can feel free to show him a few things any time you want purely in the interest of philanthropy though.”

“Well how the hell can I when it always seems to happen before I’m even in the room.”

“You could’ve come in,” said Remus, staring him down. “He would’ve liked that.” For a split second Sirius could hear nothing but the tinny ringing in his ears. “Have you ever...?”

“Yeah,” said Sirius, “summer last year, a few months after we left school.”

This was resoundingly the wrong answer: Remus’s ears went very red and his body sort of jerked as if he’d stepped barefoot on a piece of glass. Altogether it was very obvious he wanted to throw something and demand, With who? which meant that Sirius would have to confess to the arrangement having been severely disappointing and uncomfortable in a way that left a funny twinge in his jaw and a crick in his neck for nearly a week afterwards, so by way of preempting it he asked, “Would _you_ have liked that?”

“Depends on what you’d want to do I suppose.”

For a grand total of six seconds he tried to imagine any scenario where he’d be alright watching Dearborn’s blandly handsome blond head between Remus’s thighs or his cock sliding into Remus’s hole before it all devolved into a fistfight and Dearborn was relegated to masturbating in the corner or something. Fearing it showed on his face (it did, he knew it did just from looking at Remus’s off-kilter and overflowing face lit up as with moonrise like staring into the truest mirror) he decided to go for broke: “Does he ever eat you out,” he asked, breathless or near to it, practically fucking panting. At this rate he’d come in his jeans before the tape was over.

“A few times. A few times other guys have. But yes—not as often as I’d like but that night a couple of weeks ago he did,” said Remus. “Is that what you’d want?”

In the charred unlight Remus’s hips and shoulders were swaying with an underwater drift to the dizzy swivel of the guitar and Sirius could see his own thighs wide on the couch and the midnight rain smearing the moonlight through the window. _Let’s take a ride and see what’s mine_ , Iggy Pop was singing from the radio on the mantel.

“If you weren’t under _Imperius_ I wouldn’t have to ask you anything at all,” he said.

As if compelled or enchanted Remus crossed the room stepping heavily and hypnotically into the la-la-la-la-las along the creaky floorboards with murderous intent and shoved Sirius’s shoulders ungently back against the couch, straddling his lap. This close Sirius could smell him, whiskey and cigarettes and oranges on his bitter breath, lavender and dust on his skin, his heartbeat like an overripe peach bursting in the soft thin skin of his neck perhaps three inches from Sirius’s mouth, which was very dry. Humiliatingly he could tell his hands were shaking slightly so he put them on the sides of Remus’s thighs, running the palms up to his hips and around his ass, feeling the rhythm of their breathing shift as in some infernal resuscitation. When Remus leaned down to kiss him closed-mouthed neither of them shut their eyes.

Behind his head Remus’s ragged fingernails scratched against the back of the couch, the light from the fire and the candles playing bleary across his face as they melted into wax stubs; against Remus’s thighs his own knuckles were chapped with cold. Like this he thought perhaps he could do dark magic, Remus’s hands curling at his shoulders, all his long limbs in Sirius’s lap stretching around him like smoke or a funhouse mirror and his skin and his burgeoning blood conjured as from every furtive masturbatory fantasy Sirius had had since age fourteen. Do it, he was thinking, kiss me kiss me kiss me. Magic thrumming wishful between them like an instrument. Please please please do it just do it kiss me kiss me now now now now now. And then Remus did.

It was like and unlike that strange hallucinatory night in Remus’s attic bedroom and even with the fingers in his hair and his tongue flicking against the startled part of Remus’s lips he couldn’t get close enough. When they pulled apart just enough to catch their breath—sea-whisper louder than the waves, kinetic, alive, alive—he took advantage of Remus’s stunned and fragile stillness to unzip his jeans and stroke his knuckles along his cock in his boxers, already half-hard. Eyelids fluttering he wouldn’t stop watching Sirius’s face, his irises sepia-bright and cunning, his hands sliding down from Sirius’s hair to his shoulders, shivering at every brush of his knuckles along his cock and lower, against his balls and the join of his ass and his thighs through the thin fabric, breath hoarse and very soft.

“I’m not,” Remus said, the rangy cords of him pulling very tight, “I’m not normally that loud.”

“No one’s normally that loud.”

“You’re still pissed about it,” he said, fingers clenching around Sirius’s shoulders, “it’s obvious. You always were territorial about stupid shit, you have been for as long as I’ve known you. You’re so—”

His mouth was against Remus’s jaw tasting sweat and stubble and the sweetness of his skin and when he drug his teeth along the pulse-point he could feel him swallow. “Wasn’t that like, the entire point.”

Remus hummed, hips arching. “Maybe half of it,” he said.

Blistering venomous jealousy, erupting upwards from his gut and snagging along the uneven ridges of his heartbeat. Remus kissed him again and he brushed his knuckles underneath his cock again before he finally wrapped his hand around it and stroked him through his boxers, feeling the pulsing heat of him hardening and lengthening in his fist, his own cock twitching and slightly damp in his jeans; when Remus broke away gasping he rocked his hips deliberately and dug his sawblade-blunt fingernails into Sirius’s arms until Sirius’s cock pressed against his ass in his jeans and both of them sucked in the same breath through their teeth. At some point Remus had bitten his own tongue, or Sirius had done it himself, and he leaned up to press the iron tang of it into Remus’s mouth—sucking it out of his bottom lip like poison—until Remus broke away, his voice hardly a whisper, like the rhythmic shuffle of the record player sliding over the playout groove, saying, “I want to be in the bed, I want to be in the bed with you.”

Days ago they’d pushed the narrow twin beds together as a stay against the chill so they could share all the blankets but truly so their legs could tangle in the night and they could whisper to each other in the dark, hidden away in the same liminal palm of the world. A few times just before he woke Sirius could feel the silvery backcloth of their dreams rubbing kinetic and listless against each other and felt certain that if they kept on like this they would fall into the same dreamspace, which was as thrilling a prospect as it was viscerally horrifying: after all he’d had, by conservative estimates, four hundred sex dreams about Remus since he’d first seen him naked on an illicit trip to the Shrieking Shack in the brittle fog-choked morning after the shattering November full moon, all his scars and scabs and unhealed wounds old and new like a cartography to places unknown. He was, as the beat poets said, fucked. Though given that he’d watched Remus get up in the night twice since they’d arrived and not even try to disguise that he was jerking off in the bathroom he wondered if this wasn’t the apotheosis of several years’ searing and intoxicating sexual tension, although even now, with the oil lamp lit on the bedside table and Remus unbuttoning his flannel just beyond arm’s reach all he could think was, This isn’t enough.

He sat on the edge of the bed already naked, watching, his mouth dry and tasting like ash and Remus. By the time Remus turned around he was still wearing his boxers and Sirius had put a hand on his own cock as he took off his jeans, stroking very slowly while Remus watched as if awed by it all. “Remus,” he said. He didn’t have to finish. Remus came to him and pushed him back onto the sheets, palms splayed and searching over Sirius’s chest, spidery fingers spreading down his ribs and the lilting muscles in his belly, his mouth sucking something hot underneath Sirius’s jaw. In the thick of it Sirius slid his hands down Remus’s sides and got his thumbs underneath the band of his boxers, slipping them down his hips and squeezing his ass until Remus shivered and their cocks brushed together. One or the other of them or both made a sound like they’d been punched.

“What do you want,” he asked, running his hands down Remus’s sides and his back, counting the butterfly-span of his ribs, his spine unzipping beneath Sirius’s fingers. After a minute he reached down and took Remus’s cock in his hand for the first time, just holding the heavy blood-hot length in his fist, watching Remus jolt like he’d just been struck when he stroked his thumb underneath the slick head. “Remus. Tell me what you want.”

“God, you sound like—you sound just like I thought you would,” said Remus, breath stuttering, pushing himself into Sirius’s hand, “saying that.” Already he was nearly speaking into Sirius’s mouth but then he closed the distance, kissing him again, twining his fingers through Sirius’s dark hair.

“You could’ve just asked. You know I can’t say no to you, I wouldn’t.”

“Liar,” said Remus, though he was smiling, the left side of his lovely bitten-red mouth pulled wide. “You’ve spent a long goddamn time saying no to me.”

“You didn’t fucking ask but you always act like I should be able to read your mind.”

“Well I’m asking—” he broke off as Sirius circled his thumb and then the tip of his tongue across his nipple. He was thinking about flipping them over so he could have Remus on his back when it seemed Remus got ideas of his own and wrapped a sweaty hand around Sirius’s cock, gripping tightly and stroking very slowly with one of his calluses almost cruelly dragging along the underside and all his weight bearing down until Sirius was practically insensate within twelve seconds. “This,” he was saying, “I want this, I want everything you want to do to me and then some because I have at least five years full of backlogged ideas and I know you’re not good at waiting when you’ve decided you want something.”

This was incentive enough for Sirius to surge inelegantly upwards and slide out from under Remus’s thighs, shoving him onto his back in the ecstasy of blankets. So help him it was better than anything else—any other sex, any psychedelic experience, any drug, any food, any music, any dream, any masterwork behind rope at the V&A, any slice of sky with its hundred million glass-bead stars ripping out of the black. It was like being at the very end of the world with only Remus and all his skin, his scattered freckles under Sirius’s mouth and his scars lit up gold in the sulky light like kintsugi, his red open mouth, his cock laying heavy against his stomach, the blood-bright mouth-marks blooming in rosebuds along the insides of his thighs and his bent knees and on his chest. Only himself and this other, louder than anything, nearness, nakedness, indelibility. At some point he’d begun to crave the bare fact of Remus’s presence like a nicotine fit or a hunger pang dwelling somewhere down deep where the magic fed his blood, where the grist gouged out his soul.

“You’re so,” he started. Almost immediately he trailed off. “Christ.”

“What.” Remus’s breath hitched in his chest when Sirius slid his hands under his knees and pulled him closer, palms murmuring up the backs of his thighs to his ass. Outside the wind was hammering against the shutters like some spectral nighttime visitor.

Before he could gather his fractured and careening thoughts Remus took his wrist and pushed it lower, flush against improbable fever-warmth inside him, whispering the spell. Half his life Sirius had spent in service and in fear of what inheritance lay rotten and lurking in his blood but he had never known possession like this: “Now,” said Remus, compulsion in it, and yearning.

“You really would’ve made a good repressed Victorian boy dying of tuberculosis and his hideous lust,” said Sirius. He had one finger crooked gently inside of Remus, slipping against one of Remus’s own which he had pressed inside to join Sirius’s. Around him he could feel the tight ring of muscle flex as he sought something deeper inside him. “Or a doomed boy in a Western. No one’s ever looked as good as you do in nineteenth century lamplight in all of human history.”

“God, you’re such a liar,” Remus laughed, the gentle torque of his belly rippling up to his chest. Then Sirius joined another finger to the two inside him and the laughter turned to something else; during proceedings his erection had waned a bit and so Sirius decided now would be a good time to prove something, lowering his head to Remus’s navel and sucking at the peach-warm skin just above his cock and then his thighs again, feeling the tremor shudder through Remus’s bones and into his thrusting fingers like a shock of wind. “You’ve already—you have me,” he said, “flattery isn’t going to get you anywhere.”

“It’s not flattery if it’s just true.” Looking up at him poured out on the rucked-up blankets with the light dappling his skin and his pain-sharpened bones and his wiry hair spread like a crown of thorns around his head Sirius was struck with a desire or lust or love or obsession or awe or perhaps all of it at once so fierce and so unambiguous it resembled appetite: he wanted to devour him. He wanted to eat Remus whole. Unpeeled and raw, heart beating all the way down. And yet, he wondered as he took Remus’s half-hard cock in his other hand, and then in his mouth, would it even be enough then? Could it be enough? Would anything ever be?

Remus had slipped his hand out from himself and first clutched with it at the fitted sheet and then wove it through Sirius’s hair, rising up on one elbow to watch with enormous eyes. He circled his tongue over the wet head of Remus’s cock and then swallowed around him, feeling him hardening rapidly, sweet dark rush of blood, the velvet weight of it salty-slick and burnt bright against his tongue. After not so long Remus move his hips gently into Sirius’s mouth, eyes defiantly open on Sirius’s, watching his lips dragging over his cock; by then he was knuckle-deep inside of Remus and on the end of a thrust he flicked his tongue sort of languorously into Remus’s slit, his whole body jerking as with the sudden breaking of a spell. He tugged Sirius’s hair until he pulled off, sucking the head of his cock almost harshly until he let it fall off his bottom lip.

“You want to ride me,” he asked. Hadn’t even finished before Remus said yes yes yes.

Considering how the whole thing seemed like a command come down from on high for the sake of their mortal souls and/or the universe it was kind of cosmically hilarious that Sirius had neglected to do anything about his own cock, which by then was aching interminably between his legs. He’d never quite managed to get the hang of the spell it seemed Remus had mastered years ago; working it on someone else was fine, but when he tried it himself just before the final act he always made a huge and regrettable mess which he tried to covertly wipe on the sheets while his partner wasn’t looking. Limping to the bathroom for some lotion or the Vaseline he wasn’t supposed to know Remus brought with them didn’t seem ideal. And then, like some Swiss army knife of perversions—perhaps their brains truly had begun to grow together in brutalist mental overlap—Remus sat down and coaxed him onto his knees, hands clammy vise-stiff on his hips, teeth bared, only nearly a smile.

“You said just ask,” he said, “but I don’t think I need to.” Abstractly he’d wanted to hear Remus say it; he wanted to hear Remus say very many things he wouldn’t. It stopped mattering so much when he wrapped a hand around Sirius’s cock and pressed his lips over the head, tongue straying into the wetness there. Pleasure prickling along his nerves and in his groin to the crescendo-movement of Remus’s mouth and his hand, sloppy and rushed and somehow better for it, though this lasted for all of twenty seconds before Sirius had to tell him to stop and grip the base of his cock to stave off coming in Remus’s mouth.

Patiently, he thought, holding his cock for Remus who was straddling him again, don’t fuck this up, don’t you dare fuck this up, patiently, patiently. The headboard shifted against his spine, Remus’s hand around his own. When he took Sirius’s cock inside he made a tiny sound and leaned down to kiss him.

Holding as still as he could bear while Remus arched forward he stroked his hands up Remus’s chest and down again to the basin of his belly, feeling like a slug crawling across the desert in the noontime sun. “You’d look good with tattoos,” he said, and Remus’s laugh shook through his chest like it was his own. “We could give each other a few.”

“And wind up in St. Mungo’s with romantic skin infections to commemorate the occasion of our fucking.” On Sirius’s chest he splayed his hands out and shifted again, searching. He rocked forward and Sirius was trying to breathe with him very deeply when the gasp cracked out of his throat so suddenly that at first he thought the wind had changed directions and gotten into the draughty rafters in the ceiling above.

His heart was jolting in his chest. All he could do was watch Remus bow his head and then rock his hips tentatively forward again at the angle he liked where he’d struck some vein of gold inside him, watching Sirius in the butter light as though he’d never seen anything like him before, which he supposed was exactly how he was looking at Remus. Once, tripping on acid last year after they’d first moved in, he’d told Sirius he looked like a bird of prey in the right light and he’d never forgotten it; they kissed, meltingly, messily, and Sirius drug his teeth and his tongue along the cliff’s-edge jut of his collarbone, his head tipping back in pleasure as he arched backwards again with Sirius’s hands in the loose sickle-arc of his spine swooning like the secret inward loop of a 2. “Sometimes I think I wanted you before I even knew you,” he said, which he wouldn’t have done if he’d had his wits about him. In the cage of Remus’s ribs under his hands his heart was slamming a trapped birdwing-flutter all through and Sirius sought it out in his thighs and his chest and his neck and his arms and his mouth, Morse code legible only with the cipher of his body. “I’ve lost track of how long—Remus.”

“Do you ever, ah, do you normally never shut up in bed,” said Remus. Around Sirius his thighs were already shaking and he was smiling unsweetly with his eyes half-closed, rocking his hips hard and taking Sirius’s cock so deep his vision went a bit dark at the very edges. By way of answer Sirius thrust upwards, arching into him almost cruelly, Remus’s mouth falling open and his whole body trembling from the inside until it got into Sirius too, spreading quicksilver from the new and inviolable place where their bodies were joined. Fingers ranging downwards he brushed his knuckles again along Remus’s cock and then through his coarse pubic hair, stroking over his balls, all the way to the wet and open place where they had come together. After a moment Remus brought his hand around to feel the same thing, his hand heavy over Sirius’s, hissing when Sirius brushed a finger around the rim of him, stretched wide and smooth as rain-streaked silk. “Sirius. Fuck—Sirius.”

They moved together with a symphonic yearning, all the places where their bodies touched like the rasp of two matches striking together, pleasure molten and burning higher and higher. Remus lifted his hips and thrust in counterpoint to Sirius’s cock; once he pulled himself off almost entirely and moaned into the chorus of sea-waves outside when he sank back down, his body swaying like a weeping willow branch with the shadows. With a rare and starved exploratory reverence they touched all the pieces of each other as if memorizing for a continuous line drawing, watching the ways they fit and unfit together and the shapes they shifted into and the sounds they would make if kissed or bitten or fucked or touched or not touched, how Remus liked his cock stroked with a twist of the wrist at the end, the hallowed split of his hipbones where Sirius gripped him with his thumbs in the warm divots while Remus rode him, his own mouth wicked as sin naked and unrepentant under Remus’s fingers, his lips, over all the untraversed places lit up on his skin. Tectonic shift of their bodies like some two-headed creature, an articulated anatomy of shared history, their eyes unseeing of anything except each other as if they’d dreamed this all along.

At some indistinct juncture Remus said he wanted to be under him. Sirius flipped them in the dark, watching Remus’s knees fall open for him, the taste of his skin like shortbread, spice of their sweat and their breathing, pleasure coiling thick in ropes all through the wave of their bodies. “There are times,” Remus said, pressing the small of Sirius’s back with his heels like a steel trap as Sirius snapped his hips, “I think—I think you wouldn’t ever need a spell. And I can’t see how you haven’t, God, how you don’t get it.” 

He’d been thinking how it was not unlike magic to feel his body moving with Remus’s, to watch the slide of his cock inside of Remus and Remus around him clenching tight, commanding; the wonder of it—that something like this could exist, the strange and holy covenant conjured by their impossible closeness, incantation made of breath and blood, hands and mouths. This is what we’re made of, he thought: yearning and fulfillment, the dream and the act, from obsession and its thirst, from yourself and from the other which is very nearly your own. From loving and from the practice of it. Feeling like something full to the rim and near overflowing he covered Remus’s body with his own and thrust hard inside him, shoving him up on the bed so that he scrabbled for the headboard and gasped, his mouth open in the pulsing golden spread of pleasure, hish and stuttering around his own cock until Sirius reached between them and stroked it as Remus began to shake seismically all around him.

At last he could feel the kite strings of Remus’s body tightening with the thread of his breath, arching like spun sugar into Sirius’s thrusts. His body open and his eyes fever-bright, squeezing Sirius’s hand around his cock as he moved faster, striking whatever lock of lightning he’d found there, every filament wound trembling and tense. Part of Sirius wanted to hear him ask for it and indeed wanted to make him ask for it but the bigger part of him—the part that wanted to make Remus come the way he might’ve wanted a well in the desert or the bolt of flint and tinder at the icebound core of a bottomless arctic night—wanted to give Remus even the barest and most fragile slip of the unsayable things he felt. He urged Remus’s thighs farther apart and rocked his hips deep inside him, nearly pulling out at every thrust, his thumb delving into the slit of his cock—vibration, rhythm through him like percussion, pulsebeat, ritual—his mouth and his teeth biting finally into the strange bruised fruit of his beautiful neck—and when he came he barely made any sound at all as his cock pulsed in Sirius’s hand and all over his belly, his breath breaking and then rushing back into him the way it might after drowning. He clenched so wrenchingly hard around Sirius’s cock he bit down on the junction of Remus’s neck and shoulder harder than he meant and tasted blood.

It didn’t take long after that. Maybe half a minute of fucking later he felt the slick flash-point rush between his legs and up to his chest and thighs like guitar strings being tightened inexorably on an enormous fretboard and came with a choked-off cry like a birdcall in the echoing room, burying his cock deep inside Remus, who grabbed his ass almost immediately and squeezed hard. He rode out the melting sonar-sweep of it as long as he could but when he tried to pull out Remus dug his heels into his ass and pulled him back down by the shoulders. “Not yet,” he said, rasped. They stayed like that, kissing possibly for hours until he felt Remus’s lips begin to blur into his own the way everything in an impressionist painting looked the same when it was magnified. Eventually he got Remus hard again and jerked him off after his cock finally slipped from him, pressing himself close so that Remus came gasping all over both of them a second time.

“I would know,” said Sirius, some aimless and jelly-limbed time after they’d cleaned up. “If you weren’t really you. That’s like asking me to do _Lumos_ or count to three.”

Remus smiled against his neck, the humid and summery huff of his laughter tickling Sirius’s hair across his cheek. There were crumbs in the bed from when they’d been eating fresh bread and cheese and prosciutto and olives; they were sharing a local rosé straight from the bottle as the only wineglass in the place was currently in use as an ashtray on the nightstand and the blankets where they’d pulled them up around their breathing bodies smelled like sex and soft cotton, newness, scraped-rawness. He felt like sap leaking out of a tree, miraculous and uncontainable, all his pieces scrambled and reshuffled, wide open to the world. When Remus got up to put on his old Eno cassette he walked like he had “Gimme Shelter” spinning on the record player in his head. _I did that_ , he thought, shaken by pride, by love he supposed, shaken and shaken, and if he could’ve unglued his mouth he might’ve even said it.

“But if I didn’t even know I wasn’t me,” said Remus, “how would you know? You’d just go walking around with your mouth hanging open like you do blissfully unaware that Voldemort himself is watching you get a blowjob. You’d be too sex-blind to notice.”

“Fuck you. See if I open my mouth again.”

“Don’t be like that, I know you couldn’t keep it shut if you tried,” said Remus. “I saw you watching me earlier. In the other room.”

“I like watching you.” Teeth, tracing the resplendent hickeys he’d left on the side of Remus’s neck to his ear. “You really should get a tattoo. You’re dead handsome.”

“A small one on my ankle like a prison tattoo except with your initials. Or something runic.”

“Sexy. I’d probably do your birthdate somewhere.”

“That’s sweet,” said Remus. On Sirius’s thigh he was drumming a warm percussive drone; it took him a long minute to realize it was his heart, which was beating mummified and overloud always in Remus’s ear. “It’d be nice to live out here, once, you know, London’s not safe anymore and the Death Eaters come marching et cetera and we’re hiding out for sake of our sorry lives.”

“Rather get a place in the Hebrides if we’re really waiting out the inevitable.” At this Remus snorted. Far away outside a seabird called low and lonesome over and over, as if it had come upon a besieged city it no longer recognized. “Suppose all you’d do is bitch about the cold but I could keep you warm. I’d hide you away and Polyjuice myself if it came to Death Eaters storming the countryside.”

Vengefully Remus bit his naked shoulder. “Sirius. Which one of us grew up with heat that barely worked and slept in the attic and which one of us is the spoiled pureblood who’s never wanted for anything, including right now.” He sighed, grim and blue as rain, slumping into Sirius’s arms again. Thus were the fucking vicissitudes of love in the mutilating times of war and/or the late-night pathos of one’s werewolf lover hellbent on martyrdom, he thought, swallowing a mouthful of wine and then some. “Yet I’ve never said no to you even once, not when it mattered. I’ve never wanted to. Or I have, but,” he trailed off, wrapping a hand around Sirius’s knee. For a while he said nothing else; on the floor through the thin curtains the moon moved, reaching, following always on even the deepest and darkest of nights. “Why do I give you all these chances? Now especially. When it’s like objectively a very bad idea to be doing this.”

“Doesn’t stop everyone else,” he said, “but I guess we’re not everyone else where the old man’s concerned.” And you are not everyone else to me, he didn’t say. You are in my blood the like magic and disease; I would burn something down for you, I would kill for you and I nearly have. You’re like all the lights coming on in London at night, like the wild spill of desert stars, all the places I’ve never been, all the music I’ve ever loved and all the music I haven’t heard yet, your mouth and your hands and your voice my wafer and my wine, the bare skeletal stanzas of your body in the cold crush of dawn unutterable by any poetry or any song. You’re a priceless relic in a gutter, you’re a taste of holy fire, and if anyone is going to have you then by all rights it should be me.

“No matter how you look at it this is the worst thing at the worst possible time,” said Remus, a little petulantly. Sirius handed him the bottle when he reached for it. “Would you,” he asked, his spine zipping tense with the fragile undercurrent of his voice, like he wasn’t sure he wanted to ask, “if it weren’t for the war, if we weren’t—being hunted, or if we knew we weren’t going to be dead in six months. Would you have done it.”

Admittedly he’d thought about this. The war pushed and shoved and soldered them together at deforming angles; without it perhaps he’d have gone another six months before he even tried to get Remus in bed. Or another year—maybe he’d take him out for a drink or a show and kiss him stupid in an alley smelling of piss and stale beer. Maybe by the tender age of twenty-one Remus would’ve settled into a life of tepid toast-and-tea sitcom banality with Dearborn in a Norfolk house the color of oatmeal. He couldn’t conceive of any time or life or self in whatever wheeling universe plucked out of the infinite where he wouldn’t want Remus worse than he’d ever wanted anything in his entire fractured life. It was. This was, they were. Simple fact, like iron in the blood.

“Yes,” he said, “yes, Remus, God, I would’ve done it anywhere, anytime, you’re always going on about what a dog I am so I’m fucking amazed you’re even asking. I’m dripping fucking wet with it. Sometimes it’s just, it’s overwhelming, like I can feel you everywhere in everything and I can’t stand it because it’s you I want and it’s you I don’t have and you know how this goes. The point is I’ve wanted this for a long time. The war just adds an extra zest I guess.”

“Zest,” said Remus. He’d turned around, their limbs stretching into a cat’s cradle together. “I dreamed you would,” he said, like a back-alley oracle. “I used to wonder if you did too. Or if it showed on my face. But some part of me still wanted you to know.”

“This is hardly a fair fight. One good fuck and I’m all vulnerable and barely aware of my surroundings and you’re taking advantage.” He kissed the laugh in Remus’s mouth, thumbs smoothing over his jawbone; when he pulled back just enough to breathe Remus was smiling from his mouth up, all the way across his cheeks and his crinkled eyes and his nervous brow to his tangled hairline. Sirius’s mouth dried up. “Would you know if it wasn’t me?” he asked, which wasn’t what he’d meant to say at all. “If they were good enough you might never even notice and nothing exciting will even happen because you’ll just be dead.”

Remus reached for him, pushing his hair back from his face, lamplight in his mouth and between his fingers, eyelashes clumped together and brushing Sirius’s cheek when he kissed him, his bottom lip, his cheek, the pulse running red and wild at his temple. “Not a chance,” he said.

They woke very late as if from the same dream and when Sirius got up to pee he saw something moving in the mirror, shadow moldering upon itself in the silver dark, glistening like eyes. As soon as he got his wand it was gone and even with the fire built up again they found nothing but old spiderwebs and a distant scurry, like a mouse running along the rafters. In bed again he combed his fingers through Remus’s hair and rubbed his back until he felt his breathing deepen, his magic and his dreams diffusing around him static-sweet in a way that felt jarringly intimate, the way letting someone else use your wand always did, or casting your own magic on their body. How fate might feel, when you realized too late what it was. He thought he should tell Remus but instead he fell asleep.

I love you, he thought he was saying. I love you no matter what or when or where you are. I would love you even if I wondered who you really were. To which he knew Remus would say, Don’t be a fucking idiot.

—

In the end they stayed through Christmas Eve, planning instead to leave the day after Christmas as by then they were so ensconced in fucking that every minute not spent with his hands on the marvelous machinery of Remus’s body seemed a miserable waste. Mornings they made omelets or spread fig preserves over toast with bowls of sautéed vegetables and eggs, Remus in one of Sirius’s flannels or his fisherman’s sweater and little else; there wasn’t much kitchen counter to fuck him over so they spread a blanket across the cold tiles instead and got creative with the wobbly table and chairs and the couch and the bathtub where Remus’s voice reverberated off the walls such that it almost sounded like fucking three of him at once. The weather had mellowed again into a playful warmth, the syrupy sunlight twisting across the sea and coming in through the windows onto the bed and all their bare and lovely skin. Still it was too cold to think about doing much outside but within forty-eight hours Sirius had devised a menu of places to visit in the warmer months, which he thought of now with a dawning devotion. Waking up with Remus’s cold feet at his ankles and the smell of them both like dust and tea and lavender and cigarettes and weed and all the blood singing through him at the sound of his name in Remus’s mouth felt not unlike being newborn.

There had been no more letters or apparitions though there had been more disappearances, mostly people they didn’t know and always at night. Talking to James and Lily and Peter via Floo had revealed little save that Order adjacents had reported an unusual amount of activity among the disappeared and/or Imperius’d near where he and Remus were staying in Cornwall and also Devon; Peter had worried about the likelihood of a spy among them but Sirius assured him that they changed the wards around the cottage nightly and would know if anyone crossed them, though privately he and Remus wondered if they hadn’t already done it. At any rate Peter had lost weight recently and seemed a bit bloodless and twitchy in a way that said all too clearly it would do no good to panic him further, though it might’ve just been the sudden change of style: he was wearing expensive aviators he said were a gift and was attempting to grow scraggly and distinctly un-Peter sideburns. Lily, stomach yet unchanged by the pregnancy and scowling balefully at her soda water, made a face when James twisted one of them in his fond fingers.

“Glad you’re getting your hollies and your jollies,” James said a day later, head grinning in the fireplace. It was Christmas Eve, and he’d been into the firewhiskey, and in the sooty middle distance Lily had her feet up on the back of a kitchen chair. On the floor Sirius was lying beside Remus, who was on his back and had a joint he wouldn’t relinquish: whenever Sirius wanted a hit he had to grab his wrist and put his fingers to his lips, and from this James had surmised something was afoot. His voice had that tone to it his father’s sometimes did, that knowing cadence the Potter paterfamilias would use to say, Is there something you boys would like to tell me? when he’d already found the shrooms next to James’s bed, because James was shit at hiding anything. Once, over sixth year Easter break, he watched James’s mother hand him a pair of girl’s underwear without a word, folded with the rest of the laundry, and thanked high heaven above that he had the good sense to do it outside his parents’ house, for reasons both obvious and obscure. But given that not twenty minutes previous Sirius had had Remus’s cock in his mouth in front of the same fireplace—his jeans were still unbuttoned—he couldn’t exactly blame him. 

“Are we gonna tell them anything,” Remus asked later over the dishes. They’d made enormous grilled cheeses with the leftover prosciutto and apples and tomato soup with basil and heavy cream, and Remus had cut shortbread into squares which they were trying to keep from burning in the oven. “Because I’ve never quite said anything. Even about myself. Though I know they all must know by now.”

Already Sirius could hear the James who lived in his head asking what’s going on with you and Remus, but James at least knew how to take a hint, mostly, usually, almost always. “We don’t have to tell anyone anything. Although they’re probably going to be talking about us all night like we’re a juicy question on _University Challenge_.”

“That does sound like them. Wondering what someone else is thinking when they’re the ones married and having a baby in the middle of a war. I bet we have better sex than they do.” 

“Goes without saying. James never got a handjob on a motorbike.”

“Such a shame I lost your gloves.” Gingerly Remus took the baking sheet out of the oven, the edges only a little burnt. “See Sirius, I told you I could bake.”

“So when are you going to start working your way through those Muggle cookbooks we found, with the meatloaf and egg salad aspic casserole.”

“As soon as you compensate me for all the psychedelic experiences you had without me.”

“Remus we were still barely speaking then. And besides I did it with you first.”

“But you still didn’t ask. And that was right when I started hooking up with Dearborn by the way. Funny how that works.”

Entirely unashamed at being caught out he kissed Remus, tasting a bolt of the bourbon he’d put in the shortbread, feeling him thaw from the lips first down to his chest and his hips and his pliant fingers. “If it helps you’re better than any acid, you’re better than the best trip I’ve ever had and the hardest spells I’ve ever done. You make me feel like I’m hanging off the edge of a cliff naked and diving into the Thames and watching London light up at night and eating a Hogwarts feast all at once. How’s that for compensation.”

“Been into the Seamus Heaney again or just the pot?” asked Remus. His thumbs were biting into in the pulse running quick in Sirius’s neck, tracing the flow of it like rainwater.

“That’s all me. But we can get a start on the compensating among other things soon. Want me to leave you raunchy letters around the flat?”

“Surprise me,” said Remus, turning to roll a cigarette on the table. He was smiling kind of absently to himself the way he did when he forgot someone was watching. When he finished rolling Sirius summoned fire in his thoughts and lit it for him with magic, the flame burning pure blue at the center, struck and astonished as a run of silver ore.

The truth of it was he wanted everyone to know and he wanted no one to know. He wanted to tell total strangers in town that he was in bloody murderous dripping-wet horrifying love love love and he wanted to run into it head-first like the new year or an orgasm or Christmas dinner and out of it like a house fire and he wanted no one to ever know. What a fucking affront that the rest of the world couldn’t see Remus’s fingers and his red and decadent mouth around a cigarette or the way he moved when he heard a song he liked or how his body shook just before he came or his burnt cooking or how he would lay in the fragmenting dawnlight after moonset like a saint awaiting assumption or how he spoke in the dark or his eyes ever watchful as if he was being followed or his desiccated laughter or his heartbeat untethered beneath Sirius’s hands or his tongue at the corner of his mouth in concentration or the snake-slither of his arm around Sirius or his sleeping breath on the pillow, dreaming. And how dare anyone else ever see. And how dare anyone else ever try.

And how strange, that he had already loved so much of him at so many different angles, that there was so much innumerable and incomprehensibly infinite that he wanted, that he still couldn’t see. It struck him like a blow when he thought about it all, how small and how sublime the space between one thing and another and another.

“If you really wanted to surprise me right now you could give me the peyote I know you got me,” said Remus. “Just a little so we can share.”

“I’m not sure what kind of irradiation you’re suffering from but we give our gifts at midnight around here. Not seven in the evening.”

“Or,” said Remus, fixing him with that feral look he got when he had a good idea he knew Sirius would like, “we could share some of it, and I could do something for you as a kind of trade-off.”

Sirius’s entire brain short-circuited and dropped off into a metaphysical deep fryer. “What did you—”

A sound from the other room like a rocket trundling straight to hell in the fireplace and splintering the cottage at the weak-kneed seams. Wands out and hearts leaping ten feet ahead of their bodies they went to the fireplace and found Dumbledore’s head in the hearth, his mouth drawn taut into a hangman’s rope behind his beard as they lowered their arms, but only just; he’d broken the wards to get to them.

“Sir,” he started, and was cut off at once.

“We haven’t much time, Sirius.” When he crouched down he could hear other voices speaking in the room around him though he could see no one. “Death Eaters—rather, a party comprised of those put under _Imperius_ or something like it are headed towards you right now, commanded by Death Eaters. I believe their intention is to capture you but to what ends I do not know. This cannot happen. Not to those so deeply embedded in the Order’s very heart of operations.” He looked at both of them from over the rim of his glasses as he’d done so many times affably doling out detentions in his office, which at the time had seemed grandfatherly and in retrospect seemed quite like something else. Beside him he heard Remus take an unsteady breath. “You understand.”

“How did they,” Remus said, his face drained of color as if he was seeping into the floor, “why now? They’ve had all this time.”

“Alas a question I cannot answer. Perhaps they thought they might catch you unguarded. You’ve had no more letters or observed any nocturnal oddities these few days.”

“We didn’t tell you that. Sir.” Cold sweat beading at his hairline, ears ringing through the white-noise clamor in his head screaming RUN RUN RUN. “How did you—”

“A reasonable conclusion as I had not heard news ill or otherwise from you, my dear boys!” The voice so loud cutting through the grate it might have been magically amplified. “I believe we are indeed contending with a spy in our midst, and I believe it is someone close to you. This explains certainly how they have been able to track you so easily and even get inside your flat. As I’ve said Sirius you have precious little time and you must leave immediately. Do not stop until you reach Sennen. From there you are to take the boat to the Isles of Scilly.”

“Why aren’t we going back to London.” Remus had begun summoning some of their things but he hadn’t moved from the fireplace and in the light just below his ear Sirius swore he’d never noticed the pale freckle there even though he’d had his mouth on it only hours ago. “Wouldn’t that be better.”

To Sirius this was far preferable to scattering the breadcrumb trail even farther along some tragic path trailing blood behind them like prey prolonging the inevitable; in some ways it was easier to be a non-entity in a city though it had never made them any safer. But the old man said, “You will find a safehouse there, and I believe decent fixings for a belated Christmas dinner. But there is no silver lining without a cloud—and now I must tell you both, with all the gravity befitting a situation of mortal peril: _go_.”

As soon as his head disappeared there was a clattering at the window and when they turned around with curses balanced doomed and deadly on their tongues they found a snowy owl pecking furiously at the window, a single scrap of paper clutched in her talon. When Sirius opened it (when had he unlocked it?) he unfolded it and read the apocalyptic skeletal script: _Behind you_.

There was the fireplace beckoning like some express ship to the ninth circle of hell, and there was the mirror in which the curtains hung still and shadow-creased, and there was Remus.

“How far is Scilly. With the boat ride factored in and all.” It wasn’t a question. Three score miles and ten or close enough; easy arithmetic. Dear fucking Christ. “We’re meant to his goddamn bait.”

“It’s either that or a trial run of some sort. In fact I wonder if we haven’t been this entire time.” Remus was pulling on his coat with that scorched look he got, like he’d been struck by lightning at some point. “What’s in the letter.”

Unspeaking Sirius showed him and watched him flinch harder than if he’d been struck. “Sirius,” scraping raw sound of it through the mobile bow of his mouth moving around the words, unbelieving, the same mouth Sirius could’ve drawn from memory sharper and truer than his own. “I can’t—why are you _looking_ at me like that, what the fuck are you even thinking. You can’t, this isn’t—” And he frowned, caught in some thorn that was under the shadow of Sirius’s eyes. “Were you even going to show me. If I didn’t ask.”

“It didn’t seem important. I guess.”

“Story of your goddamn life.”

What he was thinking was that it would be like this always, everything complicated by running and grieving and a certain doomed amor fati. What he was thinking was the ending of _Network_ when Howard Beale got his head blown off while the audience cheered. Quality fucking entertainment for the hungry masses. And what he was thinking louder and clearer than his own vivid heartbeat slamming in his ears was the sound of Remus saying his name in the dark, and the taste of Remus’s mouth after he’d had chocolate or whiskey or in the mornings before he’d brushed his teeth, and the way he burnt bacon even when he tried not to, and the petal-bruised mouth-mark at the hollow of his collarbone twinned with the one Remus had left on his chest just under the collar of his shirt, and all the shapes they could make between them built from the raw material of this monstrous, ineffable thing inside them.

What he was thinking was he could hear a whisper from some distant dark corner of the room bold and vibrant as blood, like a mouse scurrying through the walls.

He kissed Remus, watching his face resolve, unabstracting, crystal and vivid as the yearning he knew had transformed his own. It was the only choice worth making. Easy arithmetic, simple science, no magic like the deathless compass of someone else’s beating heart underneath your skin. They would never need any spell.

“Come on,” said Sirius, pulling Remus out the door by the hand the way he sometimes led him to vacant warehouses or the bowels of swallowing forests at the full moon, “let’s go, no more bullshit, let’s get out of here.”

“It’s going to snow tonight,” Remus said as he slid onto the motorbike behind Sirius. Above all the stars were out; ahead only the arterial curve of the road in the sharpening night.

“It doesn’t snow along this coast at all, not ever.”

“But it’s going to. Can’t you feel it?”

He was right: as he started the motorbike Sirius could feel the air tightening, the winter loam like something unearthed and decaying. There were no birds tonight, not even an owlcall. “Let’s go find some,” he said. “Hold on to me.”

All the way up the coast they heard the wind shifting fecund with voices unpeeling from thin air behind them but they never looked back. In his pockets drumming against the familiar canyon-jut of his hipbones were Remus’s fingers, marking time the only way they could, repeating and repeating in a tremolo through his lungs and his lips to the tune of a song he hadn’t heard yet. I am, you are. We are, this is. And all around the sea, and all around the midnight cold burning his face into Remus’s face, his hands into Remus’s hands, and all around them the night imperative and inescapable, the road unfurling for them just out of sight into something else, just like waking up from a dream.


End file.
